


Last Minute Invite

by NotQuiteHydePark



Category: Exiles (Marvel), New Mutants (Comics), Taylor Swift (Musician), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Concerts, F/F, F/M, Musicians, Reunions, Rock and Roll
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-11 11:24:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20545373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteHydePark/pseuds/NotQuiteHydePark
Summary: Interplanetary thief and rock star Lila Cheney knows someone's coming for her: she's in danger tonight. Opening act Sailor Twift wants her big break. Sam wants to get back with his ex, maybe possibly sometime. Rogue just wants to get out in one piece. And Talia Wagner, the alternate-Earth daughter of Wanda Maximoff and Kurt Wagner, doesn't even know why she's here.





	Last Minute Invite

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Glowbug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glowbug/gifts), [pdhudson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pdhudson/gifts).

ROGUE

Sailor Twift is almost through her set, and she’s an amazing opening act. Easy to think there’s another universe where she’s, headlining, not opening for the world’s greatest still-got-it is-she-really-a-feminist leather-clad interplanetary rocker, Lila Cheney. Who called this morning and asked some X-Men to go. “There’s gonna be trouble. More trouble than my security peeps can hold,” Lila said on the phone when Rogue picked up. “We got a very credible tip. I could use a few of the strongest mutants I know.” Yes, the phone. Not a text. Lila’s older than Rogue. A lot older than Sailor Twift.

When she stops and takes a breath and tries to see through the crowd Rogue can almost enjoy it. Sailor Twift used to make the kind of country pop that’s a feminist update on the music that Anna Marie grew up with, and now there’s some electronica in there, so it’s less regional, more For Everyone, but those melodies fly. They’re tunes of heartbreak, tunes of righteous pissed-off-ness, twangs of reconciliation, hopes for a couple that has had their ups and downs and sideways moments over and over and over, and when Twift goes into a slow number—“New Year’s Day”—it’s easy to think they’re all about her and Remy. 

Then there’s another fast number and she can’t keep the crowd out of her head any more. Too loud. Too much. It rocks, but it’s also like being pelted with rocks. Why did she have to be the one to pick up the phone at the mansion? Why couldn’t she just say no, or bow out once Kitty and Sam showed up and said they’d go? Why couldn’t—but she knows why. She’d already committed to the mission, for a longtime friend of the X-Men, and she couldn’t let friends down. 

It’s not just her powers, either, though it is her powers. Long sleeves and gloves, of course, and socks, and she knows she’s not gonna skin-to-skin touch anyone, but that’s not a relief from the overcrowding. It’s not. It’s way more than that.

She’s fought and defeated space aliens. In space. She can fly. Sometimes. She’s nearly impossible to wound, except when she’s not. Why can’t she handle fifteen thousand cheering pop fans? Especially since half of them are probably under sixteen?

The chord change at the end of the chorus to “Cornelia Street” gets her right here, on that last word “Again.” If only Anna Marie could have the space and time to to enjoy it. Instead there’s a knot of girls with light-up headbands tracing patterns in the air beside her, jostling, pushing her to the left, where at least three people tall enough to play basketball for Ole Miss are right in front, and Rogue can listen to Tift’s voice all she wants, but she just sees the bony backs of their necks. Too close. Too much. Too close. Don’t touch. Don’t touch.

Shouts from somewhere. Where? Tobacco. Pot. Rosemary. Lemon lip gloss. Rancid lipstick. Girl sweat. Boy sweat. Too much sweat. Somebody’s toes. “I’ll never walk Cornelia Street again,” not if somebody steps on your boot-toe hard enough you won’t. Legs and arms are a cluster, a finger trap, a lobster pot, a cage. Remy once lived near Cornelia Street, back when he had his own place downtown. Just think about that. About him. Too bad he’s not here.

Rogue has to put her brain in something close to combat mode so she doesn’t just literally fly out of the crowd, up into the air, and out of the show.

There’s a break between Sailor’s last song and Lila’s first, and Rogue hates how she has to stay in the crowd, stay close to the stage, can’t get any air before the headliner goes on. The shoulders and the whispers of the crowd. The crowd. 

Where’s Lila? Focus on Lila. Protect Lila. (The crowd. The crowd. Fly. Don’t fly. The buzz, the scents, the motion, the crowd, the crowd.) She’s not on stage yet. Rogue’s still waiting. It’s taking too long.

SAM

It’s been too long. It’s not like he and Lila left things broken off for good, but their liason was surely a sometime thing, and Sam—Cannonball—has had…. responsibilities.

When the call came he almost said no. Let someone else go to my hot older ex-girlfriend’s show. Is ex-girlfriend the right phrase for Lila Cheney and Sam? Maybe friend with benefits? That wasn’t a thing in Appalachia back when Sam lived there. But it sure is now.

Also not a thing: Sailor Twift. She’s younger than Sam now, older than most of her fans, and super brilliant. There’s probably a timeline in which she’s the biggest star. Well, second biggest. Alison, who is in a position to know, once explained that every Earth bar the apocalyptic ones has its own Beyoncé. But Sailor—Sam’s into these songs, very far into them, the way they speak about always trying to do the right thing, to deal with the haters, to stay at the top of your game. His favorites are the quiet ones, the twangy ones, with the mike up close to the strings. “It’s nice to have a friend,” she sings, leaning in. Sam thinks about his own best friends. Berto. Dani. Lila, when she shows up. She’ll show up soon.

What’s Lila worried about? Lila must have got some kind of last-minute text, a tip-off from a fan in the camp of the enemy. She has so many enemies…Sam will know when they show. For now, Sam’s gonna enjoy the last reverberations of this opener, settle himself in the standing crowd, get ready to rock—and to fight, if he has to fight. It’s gonna get weird, emotionally if not physically, when he sees Lila again, but it might not be bad. He can keep them all safe. He can get it right. Already he feels nigh-invulnerable.

The hubbub around him gets quiet. The soundtrack stops. The lights dim. Fifteen thousand people at least—most of them standing and facing the stage—get ready to see Lila.

The band comes out first The drummer’s Conal Duran, the bass player’s Ben Locklin. Just like the first time he saw them. No, that’s a new drummer. Same bass player though. Now with white hair. Then there’s a flash of green light, and Lila appears.

KITTY

Lila appears almost exactly as she did last time she was on TV, years ago, who knows? She doesn’t age, not even close up, and Kitty and Sam stand near the front of the crowd. Incredibly, Kitty and Lila have met a couple of times, but she’s never attended a Lila concert before. She sure wasn’t there the first time, when Doug and Dani and Sam and the rest ended up in a Dyson sphere. Sam drew it for her, later on. It was better than Larry Niven, he said. It had better be.

Sailor’s final numbers are still racing around in her head, even as Lila starts. Those songs describe her life, for sure. “It’s nice to have a friend.” “Something gave you the nerve to touch my hand.” A bit mainstream for Illyana, to be sure, but those lyrics… maybe there’s a playlist for when she gets back. The worst thing about dating a ruler of Limbo has to be the unexpected business trips. But of course Magik always comes back. Sometimes just seconds after she left.

Focus, Kitty-cat. Focus. Lila Cheney wouldn’t have called the X-Mansion and practically begged Rogue—Rogue!—to send an away team, to join an away team, if Lila didn’t have reason to think something at this concert would go very wrong. Of course Lila would never cancel a show. She likes the spotlight even more than Alison does. Though she’s also more used to it. If Lila ever gets tired of sold-out arenas and interplanetary theft…. the kids at the school want a music production course, and it’s not like Chamber’s going to teach it. Not like Kitty would ask. 

She makes a mental note, then writes on her wrist with a felt-tip in case she forgets, then turned her attention back to the stage, to Lila, to the guys (they’re all guys, or look like it—throwback much?) in her band, to the audience, to the Jumbotron, to the roof.

Now they’re on her new single, “Anti-Apocalypse.” The song has a bridge where all the guitars kick out and Lila’s just singing low over a drone, and Kitty’s spine shivers. It’s glorious. It’s sexy. So are Lila Cheney’s words. “We can’t have a world where only the strong survive. I’ll hold you forever. You keep me alive.” If Kitty could sing, and if she could make voice calls to Limbo, she’d sing that one right to Illyana. She’ll put it on their mix instead.

The guitars come back. The drums kick in. There’s something odd—a glint of red, a flash of orange—in that drummer’s eyes. Gambit always looks like that, Kitty tells herself, and then remembers that the dude behind the drums looks nothing like Gambit, who’s five hundred miles away. Lila’s lost in the song. The new rhythm guitarist sounds terrific, too: she’s following the moments when the song slows down and speeds up. Fans must think the guitarist is wearing a squid mask, but really she’s a Celaphonian— Kitty met a couple when she was a Guardian. 

The girls and the boys and the nonbinary-looking teens, with their asymmetrical hair, are rocking out, and the older types, the ones who know the early songs, like “Sam,” are rocking out too. Kitty looks up to the Jumbotron and hopes for a close-up of Lila’s dance moves, of her fingers, or maybe the Cephalonian’s. Instead she gets those red-orange eyes on the drummer, and circuitry she hasn’t seen before, right there on the screen, popping out of the screen.

Is that a Jumbotron, or something else, something with rotors, opening up above the crowd?

NOCTURNE

The music floats above the crowd. Talia can get into it, though it’s maybe commercial for her taste, not that she ever got very far as a punk rocker. She didn’t even get to make the first album she planned with Butt Monkeys, the one she wrote and started taping in her bedroom in the mansion before the Tallus decided to send her somewhere else. And somewhere else, and somewhere else again. She got tired of saving the world, and though she never got tired of rock and roll, she probably can’t ever play it onstage again: she never knows when her right leg or her right arm will crap out on her, and she’s pretty much ruled out anything that requires her to rely on them that much. No drums. No trapeze artistry. No frontwoman leaping and dancing and taking the crowd by storm with her mic. Strokes suck.

Despair also sucks. But electronic music is awesome. So is teaching. So is Thunderbird. So is their three-year-old, now that they sleep through the night. Third generation mutant superhero? President of the United East? Who knows? They’re blue and prickly and delightful and TJ would be very happy to spend the rest of her days teaching and making recordings and sometimes traveling for fun and raising Severin and never hopping into another dimension again.

But the Tallus had other plans. One minute she’s tucking in her already-firmly-asleep Severin and the next, zoop!, she’s the one with that freaking bracelet again and she’s at a concert and it’s arena rock, for Parker’s sake, there’s a Jumbotron and the biggest Marshall stacks she’s ever seen and a crowd full of kids way younger than she was when she first got sucked out of her home dimension and into the Exiles and she can try to enjoy the music but she wants to know why she’s here, what kind of interdimensional mishap the Tallus has come out of retirement and zoomed her back here to prevent. It’s something to do with Lila Cheney, of course, well-known dimension-hopping super-thief and super-star, but what? What’s going on? What can Nocturne do?

“You’re a Girl (But Only If You Want to Be)” comes up. That’s the one with the keytar solo. Lila’s playing that one herself. It’s almost a solo until the very end, when the whole band comes back with a roar. It sounds a lot like the radio hit, at least the radio hit from TJ’s Earth, although the drummer comes in too early. That’s weird.

That’s not a Jumbotron. Are those laser cannons??

ROGUE

Those are laser cannons. Four of them. Dangerous, sure, but Rogue can move faster than they can fire or focus, if she reckons the technology right, and now she’s got something to do. She’s as free as a firefly let loose from a jar on a Mississippi summer night. Combat reflexes kick in. It feels good to get up in the air, away from the crowd. Also good to be the one saving the crowd. And to save Lila and her band, if they’re the ones in danger, rather than the culprits. Lila’s been less than straight-up with her Earth-based friends before.

The Jumbotron isn’t a Jumbotron but a no-longer-camouflaged alien technology, now glowing blue and yellow and unfolding like a stop-motion-photo rose. Out of it comes a big green figure with ropy muscles and bat-wings and lizard ears. “The Vrakanin aren’t finished with you!” the figure says. Apparently he can fly.

“Hey, Greenie,” Rogue yells, way up in the air, above him. If it’s a dogfight, she want position. “Should that be ‘you’? Or do you mean ‘y’all’? ‘Cause they’re more than one of us here. And you ain’t gonna hurt anyone while we’re protecting ‘em.” Then Rogue punches the green dude, hard.

He cracks like an egg. His shell falls away and two smaller green dudes pop out, also able to fly. “The Vrakanin came prepared, and we will take our revenge on Lila Cheney!” one of the smaller dudes says, and zips down, drawing a blaster, towards the stage, where the band keeps playing. Apparently they haven’t noticed yet. (It’s all at the top of the dome, so no wonder.)

She headlocks that dude in midair and knocks him out, then toss the unconscious Vrakanin into the rafters, hearing the body roll on the light grid. She could maybe catch up to the other one, except that those thingies coming out of the big machine at the top of the arena really are laser cannons, and they’re cocked and glowing and red and almost ready to fire.

“Lila rocks but I ain’t her paid bodyguard,” she imagines saying, like it’s a thought balloon or something. “Maybe she called, but I got a higher callin’, and I’m actin’ on it now.”

She circles the machine as it descends and whack all four of the laser cannons till they’re harmless clumps of tangled metal and fused glass. The crowd is safe.

No it’s not. The cables that held the big thing up were attached to the laser cannons, not to the middle like on a real Jumbotron. Now it’s falling, and fast.

KITTY

That’s not a Jumbotron. And it’s falling, and fast.

The people around her don’t think that anything’s wrong. They see flashing lights, and flying bodies, and a big metal thing coming right at their heads, and they just assume it’s part of the show. They’re not dispersing. They’re not panicking, which is good, but they’re not dispersing.

Rogue’s fighting someone up in the air, among the lights and cables. She’s on it. Sam sees it. She’s got that. Kitty has this.

“Fastball special!” Kitty shouts at Sam, who grabs her ankle and hips as she squats. It's a familiar move: her first boyfriend invented it. Now she’s hurtling through the air, with a bit of added thrust from Sam’s momentary blasting, so that she hits the those two tons of metal before the metal can hit the rest of the crowd. 

Now it’s immaterial. She’s immaterial. If there was a bomb or a doomsday gadget or a transporter or a thumb drive with the last three seasons of Brooklyn 99 in that thing, it doesn’t matter now: no programs, no circuits, work after they’re phased straight through. 

The inert metal that used to pass for a Jumbotron phases harmlessly through the crowd, through the floor, through the basement HVAC, and she lets the momentum keep the Jumbotron, along with her, immaterial as long as it’s still touching Kitty, falling down, down, down till it’s so far below the arena’s foundations that if it materializes it’s not going to damage any of the structures above. Then she walks back up, between the molecules of the solid earth, of the concrete, of the basement ceiling and the arena flooring, and try to stick her head back up into the crowd whose lives Kitty saved.

Problem: she can’t. There’s no safe way to re-materialize up there. It’s just too crowded, and the crowd keeps moving. Someone would lose a knee. Or a lung, or a brain. Kitty herself, for example. And if she shows up again in that crowd, to see the show, and just stay immaterial? Panic, maybe. They’ll realize that they’re seeing a mutant. Or think they see a ghost.

Kitty decides to stay in the basement and run to where the stage might be. If she just walks on air up there, though, she could fritz out the electronics. She could start a panic. The main thing once the bad guys have been defeated is probably not to start a panic. Maybe the safest thing is to stay in the basement, let Sam do what Sam wants to do, let the show go on.

SAM

Lila must want to let the show go on. She won’t stop playing. She knows we’re here. Thirty thousand eyes (yes, he looked up the venue capacity; it’s good to be precise, as Scott says) are all on her. 

Sam fastball-specials Kitty up in the air so she can keep keep all the fans safe from two tons of falling metal. Then he blasts up there himself, going much, much faster, chase the second green dude, tackle him in the air, so he lands on stage. 

Dude hatches again and four scaly green creatures pops out, about the size of Remy’s cats. “The Vrakanin will never forgive you, Lila Ssssscheney!” they say in unison. Jerk. Good thing they’re all in a row, Sam thinks. Gotta catch ‘em all.

He blasts, and the impact propels all four meanies backstage. Nothing else seems to hatch out of them. A uniformed, non-flying, non-powered security guard?—Lila’s? The arena’s?—salutes Sam and nods: she’ll take it from here.

The band’s in an instrumental break. Lila sees what’s happening now. Their eyes meet. Sam feels good. He did the thing. He kept everybody safe. He did the job. Now he can play. Does she want to play?

“Later,” she mouths, taking care to step away from the mic stand so no one else hear. Then back to the mic. “This one’s called Sam.” And she points right at him.

Sam stands upright on stage as if he were one of the dancers, or maybe in a parade. He’s blushing, his fair skin pink from head to toenails. He’s her latest catch again, the unworldly boy from Kentucky who saved her popstar bacon. And he feels good.

She really is singing his song.

NOCTURNE

She really is singing that song. The one that’s her first big hit on Talia’s Earth, the one that’s still on the radio, right next to “I Love Rock and Roll” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “When Doves Cry” and “I’ve Tried Subtlety” and “Fire Drills.” 

Talia wishes she had written them all. And everything else on all Lila’s albums, really, except for her covers album (she’s best on her own stuff). Talia used to play along with whole albums as warmups, taking each instrument in turn. Talia even made chord charts for “Sam.” 

Now she’s pretending to sing those words, keeping her retractable tail in even though it wants to pop out, hoping no part of her body gives out right now. She’s watching the big stage as if she could ever be on it.

Honestly, Lila’s great and all, but why the #$%@ did the Tallus bring her here?

Is Lila important to the history of the cosmos, somehow? Probably. Talia makes a mental note to ask why when she gets home. Someone will know who’s been to a non-awful future.

Talia just saw Sam and Rogue stop an assassination attempt, or maybe a kidnapping. Someone, Talia thinks, has it in for Lila Cheney. This version of Lila must have been more than a popstar. But what? International dictator? Jewel thief? Like Gambit? Does it matter? Cannonball and Anna Marie have it sorted, and somebody else must have handled the falling metal cube. That was no Jumbotron.

What’s up with the shift into 7/8 time in the bridge, though? That’s not in the album version, or not on Talia’s Earth. It’s not working for her.

It’s not part of the song; it’s some kind of mistake. The crowd around Talia hasn’t noticed—they’re cheering and jostling, same as ever—but the drummer, who has those orange-red eyes, is drumming with just one hand now. The other’s reaching behind him. That’s not a drumstick. It’s some sort of angular weapon. His eyes light up. 

He’s not human, he’s not friendly, and he’s not here to play drums.

Talia is. She possesses him. Her body fades out of existence as she quickly takes over his own. Talia (in the orange-eyed drummer’s body) drops the gun and grabs a drumstick from the can of spares and brings the beat back to 4/4, and the band gets through “Sam” as Sam pretends to sing along, from the front of the stage, with Lila on the coda. Lila might not even know Talia just saved her butt.

The song ends and Sam zooms up in the air and does what must be a celebration, a just-for-fun zigzag, leaving a fiery trail in the shape of an L, the shape of a C, the shape of a heart, a S, a G.

Talia has something to celebrate too. She wouldn’t take over somebody’s body just so she could play the drums, or sing, or anything like that, but here she is. She came to stop a riot. She came to keep the music going, to keep the concert from crapping out, to keep the crowd from trampling one another. She’s here so everyone gets out alive.

She’s got the hi-hat, the cymbal, the kick, the snares, the bells. She knows where they are, and she’s stronger than she’s ever been—this alien guy has muscles where his muscles should be, and he’s flexible too. She could literally do this all night. 

Fifteen thousand Lila Cheney and Sailor Twift fans will never know how close they came. She’s keeping the beat. She’s hitting it. She knows these songs. She’s playing. The Tallus speaks to her again, silently, and tells her she’ll get to go home tomorrow, by the time Severin wakes and asks for her. For now, the show goes on.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Glowbug for beta and notes on Rogue, and to pdhudson for notes on Talia! The technique's a pale copy of pdhudson's: read their X-fic, please, before you read mine. A lot of the Lila and Sam canon here comes from New Mutants Annual 1, aka Steal This Planet; for Talia's backstory, see Exiles v1 nos. 41-42. For her stroke, see New Excalibur 16.


End file.
